Recent decades have witnessed the emergence of artificial intelligence as a serious science and engineering discipline. Artificial Intelligence: Foundations of Computational Agents is a textbook aimed at junior to senior undergraduate students and first-year graduate students. It presents artificial intelligence (AI) using a coherent framework to study the design of intelligent computational agents. By showing how basic approaches fit into a multidimensional design space, readers can learn the fundamentals without losing sight of the bigger picture. The book balances theory and experiment, showing how to link them intimately together, and develops the science of AI together with its engineering applications.

Although structured as a textbook, the book's straightforward, self-contained style will also appeal to a wide audience of professionals, researchers, and independent learners. AI is a rapidly developing field: this book encapsulates the latest results without being exhaustive and encyclopedic. It teaches the main principles and tools that will allow readers to explore and learn on their own. The text is supported by an online learning environment, artint.info, so that students can experiment with the main AI algorithms plus problems, animations, lecture slides, and a knowledge representation system for experimentation and problem solving.

About the Authors

David Poole is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. He is known for his research on abductive and default reasoning, probabilistic inference, and relational probabilistic models, and he has recently been working on semantic science, combining ontologies, data, and rich probabilistic theories.

Alan Mackworth is a Professor of Computer Science and Canada Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence at the University of British Columbia. He is known for his research on constraint-based systems and agents, hybrid systems, and robot soccer.